The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935

The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 PDF Author: Laura L. Behling
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252026270
Category : Lesbianism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focuses on late 19th- and early 20th-century American society, where, the author says, "the beginnings of modern sexuality and psychology intersect with the foundations of modern womanhood...." Suffragettes demanding social and political independence were often transformed by literature and the popular press into "masculine women" and female sexual "inverts." While Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinities (1998), say, focused on contemporary society and the idea of male masculinity, Behling (English, Gustavus Adolphus College) exclusively addresses an earlier time when sartorial and political masculinity in relation to the female body was often interpreted as a medical as well as political condition. Behling's documents include Gertrude Stein's early novel Fernhurst, Henry James' Bostonians, Dr. William Lee Howard's novel The Perverts, newspaper accounts, Hellen Hull's "Fire," Sherwood Anderson's Poor White, and the artwork that accompanied Djuna Barnes's satiric Ladies Almanack. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935

The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 PDF Author: Laura L. Behling
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252026270
Category : Lesbianism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focuses on late 19th- and early 20th-century American society, where, the author says, "the beginnings of modern sexuality and psychology intersect with the foundations of modern womanhood...." Suffragettes demanding social and political independence were often transformed by literature and the popular press into "masculine women" and female sexual "inverts." While Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinities (1998), say, focused on contemporary society and the idea of male masculinity, Behling (English, Gustavus Adolphus College) exclusively addresses an earlier time when sartorial and political masculinity in relation to the female body was often interpreted as a medical as well as political condition. Behling's documents include Gertrude Stein's early novel Fernhurst, Henry James' Bostonians, Dr. William Lee Howard's novel The Perverts, newspaper accounts, Hellen Hull's "Fire," Sherwood Anderson's Poor White, and the artwork that accompanied Djuna Barnes's satiric Ladies Almanack. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The Masculine Modern Woman

The Masculine Modern Woman PDF Author: Jenny Ingemarsdotter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042965653X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book takes a fresh approach to one of the most popular cultural symbols of modernity in the 1920s—the "masculine" modern woman. Uncovering discourses on female masculinity in interwar Sweden, a nation that struggled to become modern but not decadent, this study examines cultural representations and debates across several arenas including fashion, film, sports, automobility, medicine and literature. Drawing on rich empirical material, this book traces not only how the masculine modern woman reshaped the imaginary space of what women could be, do and desire, but also how this space was eventually shrunk in order to fit into an emerging vision of a family-oriented "people’s home."

The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany

The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany PDF Author: Katie Sutton
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857451219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
Throughout the Weimar period the so-called “masculinization of woman” was much more than merely an outsider or subcultural phenomenon; it was central to representations of the changing female ideal, and fed into wider debates concerning the health and fertility of the German “race” following the rupture of war. Drawing on recent developments within the history of sexuality, this book sheds new light on representations and discussions of the masculine woman within the Weimar print media from 1918–1933. It traces the connotations and controversies surrounding this figure from her rise to media prominence in the early 1920s until the beginning of the Nazi period, considering questions of race, class, sexuality, and geography. By focusing on styles, bodies and identities that did not conform to societal norms of binary gender or heterosexuality, this book contributes to our understanding of gendered lives and experiences at this pivotal juncture in German history.

Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace

Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace PDF Author: Linda M. Morra
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554584302
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 493

Get Book Here

Book Description
Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada. The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present. From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae—missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication—that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.

Fearless Femininity by Women in American Theatre, 1910s to 2010s

Fearless Femininity by Women in American Theatre, 1910s to 2010s PDF Author: Lynne Greeley
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621967425
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 588

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this unprecedented, fascinating book which covers women in theatre from the 1910s to the 2010s, author Lynne Greeley notes that, for the purposes of this study, "feminism" is defined as the political impulse toward economic and social empowerment for females or the female-identified, a position perceived by many feminists as oppositional to ideas of femininity that they see as personally and politically constraining and that "femininity" comprises social behaviors and practices that mean as "many different things as there are women," some of which are empowering and others of which are not. This book illuminates how throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, playwrights and artists in American theatre both embodied and disrupted the feminine of their times. Through approaches as wide ranging as performing their own recipes, energizing silences, raging against war and rape, and inviting the public to inscribe their naked bodies, theatre artists have used performance as a site to insert themselves between the physicality of their female presence and the liminality of their disrupting the role of the feminine. Capturing that place of liminality, a neither-here-nor-there place that is often unsafe, where the established order is overturned by acts as banal as raising a plant, women have written and performed and disrupted their way through one hundred years of theatre history, even within the constraints of a variably rigid and usually unsympathetic social order. Creating a feminist femininity, they have reinscribed their place in the culture and provided models for their audiences to do the same. This comprehensive tome, part of the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts headed by John Clum (Duke University) is an essential addition for theater studies and women's studies.

Queering the Underworld

Queering the Underworld PDF Author: Scott Herring
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226327922
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
At the start of the twentieth century, tales of “how the other half lives” experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without leaving home turned to these narratives for spectacular revelations of the underworld and sordid details about the deviants who populated it. In this major rethinking of American literature and culture, Scott Herring explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. Queering the Underworld examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader’s desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control. Herring is persuasive and polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics, and Queering the Underworld will be widely read by students and scholars of literature, history, and sexuality.

Celibacies

Celibacies PDF Author: Benjamin Kahan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377187
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality. Celibacies focuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation. Celibacies offers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.

Building a Housewife's Paradise

Building a Housewife's Paradise PDF Author: Tracey Deutsch
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807833274
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Get Book Here

Book Description
An examination of the history of food distribution in the United States explores the roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores.

Riding Pretty

Riding Pretty PDF Author: Renee M. Laegreid
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803229550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
An examination of the Rodeo Queen phenomenon in the American West, from its first appearance at the 1910 Pendleton, Oregon, Round-Up, to 1956, when the Rodeo Queen transformed from a Western into a national symbol.

A Dream of the Future

A Dream of the Future PDF Author: Nathan Cardon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190274735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
As an age of empire and industry dawned in the wake of American Civil War, Southerners grappled with what it meant to be modern. The fair expositions popular at this time allowed Southerners to explore this changing world on their own terms. On a local, national, and global stage, African Americans, New South boosters, New Women, and Civil War soldiers presented their dreams of the future to prove to the world how rapidly the South had embraced and, in the words of Henry Grady in 1890, built "from pitiful resources a great and expanding empire." Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Atlanta and Nashville world's fairs held at the close of the nineteenth century. Here, Southerners presented themselves as modern and imperial citizens ready to spread the South's culture and racial politics across the globe. Unlike the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, the Southern expositions also gave African Americans an opportunity to present their own vision of modernity within the fairs' "Negro Buildings." At the fairs, southern African Americans defined themselves as both a separate race and a modern people, as "New Negroes." In Dream of the Future, Cardon explores these assertions of Southern identity and culture, critically placing them within the wider context of imperialism and industrialization.